July 16th, 2018 
CryptoBadger It’s Amazon Prime Day again, and there are currently some pretty decent deals on mining-related hardware to be found:
If you have an American Express credit card, it may be possible for you to take an additional 20% off these prices (up to $100) via Amazon’s current promo.
February 25th, 2018 CryptoBadger (Note: I wrote this last Tuesday, but held off publishing because no exchanges actually allowed Litecoin Cash (LCC) deposits, making this process pointless. There is now one exchange allowing LCC deposits and trades (see step 3 of the article), so it’s finally possible to unload your LCC by following this guide.)
This past Sunday, the Litecoin (LTC) blockchain was hard-forked to create a new coin called Litecoin Cash (LCC), in much the same way that Bitcoin Cash was created back in August of last year. Many in the cryptocurrency community consider forks like these to be simple cash grabs at best, and potential scams at worst. In a sane world, Litecoin Cash should be nearly worthless—but the cryptocurrency space is still saturated with people trying to strike it rich on “the next Bitcoin/Litecoin/Ethereum”, and the prospect of buying up what they perceive as Litecoin 2.0 for a fraction of the cost of the real thing must seem really appealing.
At least, that’s certainly the way it seems, given that the price of Litecoin Cash has increased about 500% since its creation roughly 48 hours ago. A single LCC coin is worth nearly $10 on YoBit.net, the only exchange that is currently supporting LCC as far as I can tell. Given that the LCC hard fork created 10 times as many coins as there were on the original LTC blockchain (e.g.: for every 1 Litecoin, the fork created 10 Litecoin Cash coins), this is an objectively absurd valuation that should hopefully sort itself out as people start to think more critically about essentially creating copies of wealth (update 2/25: the price on YoBit.net is down to ~$6, but deposits aren’t allowed—CryptoBridge does support deposits and trading, but the price of LCC is hovering around one dollar there).
But in the meantime, those of us holding Litecoin at the time of the fork now also have some Litecoin Cash (10x as much, to be exact—if you had 10 LTC when the fork occurred, you now also have 100 LCC). Given the current price of LCC, this is a great opportunity to dump your forked coins and pick up some essentially free LTC (or ETH, BTC, USD…).
Read on for a basic guide on how to safely sell your LCC.
February 15th, 2018 CryptoBadger I normally don’t post about every new release of Claymore’s miner, but this one is a bit different in that it’s probably worth your time to make the upgrade from whichever release you currently have installed on your rig(s). Version 11.0 of the popular miner was released about a week ago, and I’ve been running it on my own rigs for several days now with no issues. The latest release offers the following:
You can get the latest version here. Note that you may have to whitelist it with your anti-virus software, as many flag Claymore as potential malware.
January 12th, 2018 CryptoBadger If you rebooted your linux-based mining rig at some point in the last couple days, you may have noticed that your mining hashrate was drastically lower after your system restarted. What happened?
Turns out a kernal update designed to patch the Meltdown & Spectre vulnerabilities present in Intel CPUs was deployed on January 9th, and it had the unintended consequence of negatively impacting GPU mining speed.
Thankfully, you can manually remove the update for now. Just follow these instructions and you should be back to normal.
Thanks to the many readers that wrote in and made me aware of the issue!
January 7th, 2018 CryptoBadger Happy (belated) New Year! I intended to get this post up earlier, but I’ve been under the weather lately.
Now that we’re about a week into 2018, it’s probably a good time to talk about what’s in store for cryptocurrency as this decade winds down. I see daily questions from readers about my opinions on what the future holds, and I typically don’t respond (especially regarding price predictions) because I just don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. With that said, I do think it’d be fun to take a few educated guesses regarding major cryptocurrency developments that’ll probably happen in 2018-2019.
Read on for a look into CryptoBadger’s crystal ball!
December 23rd, 2017 CryptoBadger 
Just wanted to take a minute and wish everyone a happy holiday season!
I’ve heard from quite a few of you over the past couple months, including some folks that started following my blog back in 2013. A few of you have indicated that you’re now crypto-millionaires, which is incredible. While I haven’t been able to respond to everyone individually, it’s been really amazing hearing all of your stories.
Hope everyone has an enjoyable holiday—look for my 2018 cryptocurrency predictions at some point in the coming week!
November 29th, 2017 CryptoBadger Just a quick note that I finally sat down and updated the hardware, Linux, and Windows sections of my Ethereum mining guide today, bringing everything up-to-date with current best practices.
The Linux setup guide especially deserves your attention if you set up your own rig in the recent past and have noticed a slow degradation in speed over time as the Ethereum DAG file has grown in size. The guide now uses the recently-released (for Linux anyway) AMD blockchain compute drivers, along with the latest version of Claymore’s miner, which should bring your rig back up to its original speed (my own quad GPU rig had degraded down to ~80 MH/s since May, after installation I’m back up to ~110 MH/sec).
November 26th, 2017 CryptoBadger With Bitcoin’s price currently hovering around $9,400 on Coinbase, it’s time for the obligatory “it’s over 9000” post. Bitcoin’s value has been increasing steadily over the past 48 hours, hitting new all-time highs nearly hourly—and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down. Let’s all pause and remember that one bitcoin cost a mere ~$700 just one year ago!
The rapid recent price inflation is probably due to the “Thanksgiving effect”. Holidays are a prime opportunity for tech-saavy family members to extol the virtues of cryptocurrency to less technology-literate relatives. I’d wager that quite a few Thanksgiving dinner discussions revolved around Bitcoin, which caused masses of newly-exposed people to invest (Coinbase reportedly added over 100,000 new users on Thanksgiving).
It’s not just Bitcoin that’s up—cryptocurrency in general has seen double-digit gains over the past week. Ethereum and Litecoin are actually both up more than Bitcoin, at ~30% and ~20% respectively.
I’ve been telling people for months that 2018 will be the year of the five-figure Bitcoin. It looks like I was probably wrong—at this rate, we’re going to see Bitcoin top $10,000 before 2017 is over.
November 9th, 2017 CryptoBadger With only a week to go before its planned implementation, yesterday’s announcement that Bitcoin’s planned SegWit2x fork is being shelved indefinitely came as somewhat of a surprise.
Ultimately this is good news. Bitcoin is already confusing enough to the average individual without another fork caused by lack of community consensus added to the mix—especially in the wake of the (very) recent Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold forks. Many view these recent forks as nothing more than scams designed to create wealth “out of thin air” by creating duplicate coins, and killing SegWit2x instead of further fracturing Bitcoin sends the right message.
The way that the SegWit2x saga unfolded still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, however. I suspect that the six individuals responsible for SegWit2x and its cancellation became quite a bit wealthier collectively over the past 24 hours. Judging from cryptocurrency pricing trends over the past couple weeks, quite a few investors have been shifting their funds from altcoins to BTC in anticipation of their “free” SegWit2x coins on the fork date. In the hours following the announcement that SegWit2x was dead, BTC dropped about 10%—and predictably, altcoins started rising steadily as people began converting their BTC back into other coins. Timing the cancellation announcement so close to the planned implementation (with Bitcoin’s price at an all-time high) probably made some insiders rich at the expense of the masses (like this unfortunate soul). Welcome to unregulated markets!
October 15th, 2017 CryptoBadger Just a quick heads up that the Ethereum network will experience a planned hard fork at some point early tomorrow. A few of you have emailed me with questions about what you need to do to prepare, and the short answer is that no action is immediately necessary if you’re primarily worried about the continued operation of your miners. Your rigs will continue mining after the fork, and your mining pool will continue payouts to your wallet address (most large pools, including ethermine and nanopool, have already announced readiness for the fork).
You will need to make sure to update your wallet software before creating new transactions (e.g.: sending your ETH to another address) on the Ethereum network post-fork. You don’t need to do this immediately—just make sure that you update before sending coins from your wallet. The latest release of Mist (the official Ethereum client, and the wallet I generally recommend) can be found here. If you use another wallet, make sure that you grab the latest update from your wallet provider.
If you followed my mining guide and installed geth to generate your initial wallet address, there is no need to update it unless you want to use geth to perform manual transactions (which I really don’t recommend!).
